Reduced power dissipation through truncated multiplication

Reducing the power dissipation of parallel multipliers is important in the design of digital signal processing systems. In many of these systems, the products of parallel multipliers are rounded to avoid growth in word size. The power dissipation and area of rounded parallel multipliers can be significantly reduced by a technique known as truncated multiplication. With this technique, the least significant columns of the multiplication matrix are not used. Instead, the carries generated by these columns are estimated. This estimate is added with the most significant columns to produce the rounded product. This paper presents the design and implementation of parallel truncated multipliers. Simulations indicate that truncated parallel multipliers dissipate between 29 and 40 percent less power than standard parallel multipliers for operand sizes of 16 and 32 bits.